Richard W. Schabacker, in *Technical Analysis and Stock Market Profits* (1932) — the first systematic textbook of chart reading, written years before the canonical Edwards & Magee — argued that 'the action of the market itself is to be considered the most fundamental of all factors,' because every fundamental fact eventually reaches the tape and registers there as price and volume. Candlesticks are simply a denser visual encoding of that same tape.

They package four numbers per period (open, high, low, close) plus volume into a single shape that summarizes who won the period — buyers or sellers — and how decisively. Reading the language honestly means recognizing both what the shape tells you (a probabilistic tilt in the next period's price) and what it does not (a guaranteed outcome). Most academic studies of single-candle and short-pattern signals find effects that are statistically detectable in some samples but small after transaction costs, and inconsistent across regimes.